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Illuminations the Final Work of a Pioneering Cinema Scholar Noah Isenberg FILM Illuminations The final work of a pioneering cinema scholar NOAH ISENBERG CINEMA AND EXPERIENCE: SIEGFRIED KRACAUER, WALTER BENJAMIN, AND THEODOR W. ADORNO by miriam braTu HaNSEN bErkELEy: uNivErSiTy of CaLiforNia prESS. 408 pagES. $30. ny student of silent cinema, critical theory, and the movie reviews for Weimar Germany’s newspaper of record, with catastrophe, and its prevention in the nick of time.” As Frankfurt School, or film aesthetics and the avant- the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, before publishing his two for the significance of Disney, Hansen devotes a chapter to A garde, will surely at one point or another have film books written in the US: From Caligari to Hitler: A Benjamin’s writing on Mickey Mouse, noting early on that come into contact with the work of Miriam Hansen. Her Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and what he saw as the principal appeal of these cartoons, groundbreaking study Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). much like the appeal of Kafka or Chaplin, was “the fact that American Silent Film (1991) inspired a generation of film Owing to the variety of quotidian subjects taken up in his the audience recognizes its own life in them.” In a similar scholars to place greater emphasis on the ways in which film urban reportage (hotel lobbies, sports, radio, the circus, vein, Benjamin elucidated a strong connection between audiences constitute an alternative public sphere. Likewise, etc.), and to an elegant prose style that Hansen aptly dubs Hollywood cartoons and the German fairy tale (and, by her trenchant essays published over the last few decades in “writerly or poetic,” Kracauer’s Weimar-era feuilletons extension, between American popular culture and German New German Critique, on whose editorial board she served, anticipated the lapidary vignettes in such later works as high culture): “All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the Critical Inquiry, October, and elsewhere immediately Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957). motif of leaving home in order to learn the meaning of fear.” became regarded as required reading—as they still are Hansen tracks the precise development of Kracauer’s Hansen subtly foregrounds such discursive links without today—among aspiring film scholars and critical theorists understanding of film, pointing out the different ways in overstating them. alike; the kinds of essays that prompt serious reflection, fre- which he revises and adapts his positions over time. For The section on Benjamin forms the core of Hansen’s quent citation, and unusually wide dissemination. Above work, taking up five of the book’s nine chapters. Here she all, her work helped transform the field of American film wrestles with some of Benjamin’s most enigmatic concepts, studies by combining theoretical rigor with far-reaching including the notion of aura that he developed in his most historical scholarship. famous essay. Somewhat akin to his ambivalent position Born in West Germany after the war, Hansen studied at regarding modern experience—embracing the innovations the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt in the of new media (photography, film, radio, etc.) and their late 1960s and ’70s, under the tutelage of New German Cin- potential to transform, even to liquidate, past notions of ema pioneer Alexander Kluge and the influential German autonomous art, while also bemoaning the atrophy of expe- film scholar Karsten Witte. Like many of her classmates in rience in the face of such technological advances—aura crops Frankfurt during those years of student unrest, she turned to up in a number of competing and occasionally contradictory critical theory, particularly the writings of Theodor W. guises in Benjamin’s opus (it is likened, in his hashish exper- Adorno and Walter Benjamin, as a source of sustenance and iments, to late van Gogh paintings or, in his “Little History a means of grasping Germany’s tainted past. Soon after fin- of Photography,” to a seemingly Romantic, quasi-mystical ishing her doctoral thesis on Ezra Pound, she emigrated to experience of nature). As Hansen puts it: the United States, where she initially held posts at Yale and Rutgers before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago Aura is a medium that envelops and physically connects—and thus blurs the boundaries between—subject and object, sug- in 1990. As the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service gesting a sensorial, embodied mode of perception. One need Professor in the Humanities, she helped establish Chicago’s only cursorily recall the biblical and mystical connotations of celebrated Department of Cinema and Media Studies, teach- breath and breathing to understand that this mode of percep- ing film history and theory up until her death in February of tion involves surrender to the object as other. last year. During the past decade or so, in the face of a protracted Hansen’s nuanced reading of Benjamin reveals her extraor- battle with illness, Hansen worked on a project she some- dinary erudition, and suggests the command of someone who times referred to as “The Other Frankfurt School,” a highly has spent decades digesting these occasionally knotty texts. ambitious study that sought to bring together her abiding Writing on Adorno, whose lectures she attended as a interests in Adorno, Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer and Frankfurt School favorite Charlie Chaplin. student, Hansen cautions her readers against a too-easy their respective writings on cinema, mass culture, and the dismissal of his position on mass culture as “mandarin, experience of modernity. That project, now posthumously example, in his reading of the so-called Bergfilm, or moun- conservative, and myopic.” Adorno’s notoriously allergic published by the University of California Press as Cinema tain film, of the 1920s, he initially extols its ability to convey reaction to jazz, not to mention his powerful invective and Experience, represents the culmination of her intellec- “a delightful optical intoxication,” only later, after fleeing against the “culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment tual labors, and is a deeply personal undertaking. “I couldn’t fascism, to lambaste it for the “antirationalism on which the (1947), should not discount him from being considered a fail to realize,” she writes in the book’s preface, finished just Nazis could capitalize.” Similarly, Hansen shows, in a scru- shrewd and perceptive interpreter of film. Although he a few months before she died, “the extent to which this proj- pulously researched and revelatory fashion, how Kracauer’s didn’t write on the subject with anywhere near the same ect was bound up with my own history, a history that early writings on photography anticipate his later theory of sustained commitment as Kracauer, nor with the same vital entailed switching countries, languages, and fields—from film and, to a certain extent, prefigure Benjamin’s theoretical curiosity as Benjamin, Adorno offered several provocative Germany to the United States, from German to English, from reflections in his famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the critiques of the medium. Fleetingly, and surprisingly, during the study of literary modernism and the avant-garde to the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” On a formal the early phase of New German Cinema in the early ’60s, study of film.” level, Kracauer and Benjamin both structure their writing Adorno expressed “hope that the so-called mass media Divided into four distinct yet overlapping parts, one for “in the manner of different camera positions or separate might eventually become something different.” While he each figure (with a final part on Kracauer in exile), the book takes,” thereby suggesting the fundamental impact of film never showed much affection for the movies (Kluge once probes the conceptual terrain unearthed by these three think- on their work. quipped that Adorno’s opinion of film could be summarized ers, all of whom, like Hansen, moved freely—occasionally Among the many affinities that Kracauer shared with as “I love to go to the cinema; the only thing that bothers me treacherously and by necessity—across borders, disciplines, Benjamin, beyond those strictly of a formal or theoretical is the image on the screen”), he weighed in on theoretical languages, and idioms. What links these theorists and their nature, was a mutual appreciation of Chaplin, slapstick debates concerning montage, the principles of realism and ideas is not just their personal and professional ties (all were comedy, and Disney. (The notably less film-friendly Adorno the avant-garde, and “the neutralization and abstraction of of bourgeois German-Jewish backgrounds, all born near the reserved his admiration for the Marx Brothers.) For Benjamin, time in mass culture.” turn of the twentieth century, all friends, colleagues, and Chaplin was the great champion of the disinherited, a The occasional density of Hansen’s prose is not unlike devoted interlocutors), but their shared investment in ideas prophet of alienation, and a window onto the modern condi- that of Adorno’s—who famously defended the merits of concerning the aesthetic forces of modernity, and how these tion, making him, among other things, the perfect “key to rigorous forms of philosophical inquiry. Hansen’s work forces work within mass culture. One of the oft-cited con- the interpretation of Kafka.” Likewise, Kracauer considers tacitly subscribes to this notion, though the effort she cepts that Hansen introduced, “vernacular modernism,” Chaplin a “diasporic figure,” a “pariah” (slightly at odds demands of her reader is amply rewarded by the rich sug- would seem to apply, at least obliquely, to the exploration with Adorno’s more abstract, less affirmative understanding gestiveness and expansive quality of her insights. Those that she undertakes here, as it underpins the three scholars’ of the Little Tramp as “a ghostly [or haunting] photograph students who’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted mutual preoccupation with film as a means of understanding in the live film”).
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